This presentation brings together storytelling, design thinking, and complexity as it discusses approaching the difficult challenges facing Colorado’s emergency management community. Focused on problem framing, storytelling is explored as a key step in engaging with complex issues while the audience is invited to think about the stories they are currently telling about problems and consider how they might begin to craft different ones.

1. Design
Thinking
for the
End of the
World
Storytelling ● Design Thinking ● Complex Problems
Gregory Vigneaux
@Gregory_Vig

2. Sense-making:
“How do we make sense of the world
so we can act in it?”
– Dave Snowden

3. Q1. How do we make sense of the problem we are trying to solve so
that we can design solutions for them?
Q2. How can these sense-making processes be purposefully directed
at complex problems?
I. Problems, Complexity, and Disaster Losses
II. Design Thinking and Problem Solving
III. Design Thinking, Storytelling, and Problem Identification/Framing
IV. Designing for Complex Environments
Questions

4. Problems
“A ‘problem’ occurs only when
we either do not know how to
progress or our chosen way of
working gets us stuck.”
– Kees Dorst

5. “Disaster losses are the
result of interactions
among three systems and
their many subsystems.”
– Dennis Mileti
Complex Problems
Earth’s Physical
System
Human
System
Atmosphere
Cryosphere
Lithosphere
Hydrosphere
Population
Culture
Economics
Social
Class
Politics
Buildings
Roads
Public
Infrastructure Housing
Constructed
System
Community
Suprasystem

6. Design Thinking as Process

7. “All that we do, almost all the time
is design, for design is basic to all
human activity. The planning and
patterning of any act towards a
desired, foreseeable end
constitutes the design process.”
Design Thinking as Sense-Making

8. What are the
contents of the
present?
How would we like
them to be different
in the future?
What will we create or how
will we act to bring the
desired future into being?
1. The Problem 2. The Solution
3. The Thing
(e.g. Increasing
propensity to
incur disaster losses)
(e.g. Decreasing
propensity to
incur disaster losses )
(e.g. Risk communication)
Design Thinking as Sense-Making Through Story

9. “The world we live in is not
independent from us; we
literally bring it forth ourselves.”
– Humberto Maturana
Sense-Making Through Storytelling

10. Sense-Making Through Storytelling
"This is the foundation
of all language: to be
able to create from
nothing (the void) one
thing, or state, or space
that is distinct.”
– John Mingers
The Dynamics of Storytelling
Foreground
Background
(Nothingness)
“Thing”
Boundary
(Inclusion Criteria)

11. “We cannot consider
life, the universe, and
everything in its totality
all the time. We need
limits in order to say
something.”
–Paul Cilliers
Problem/Solution/ThingEverything
Stories moves us from the general to the particular

12. 1. The Problem 2. The Solution
3. The Thing
Design Thinking as Sense-Making
Foreground
Background
(Nothingness)
“Thing”
Boundary
(Inclusion Criteria)
Foreground
Background
(Nothingness)
“Thing”
Boundary
(Inclusion Criteria)
Foreground
Background
(Nothingness)
“Thing”
Boundary
(Inclusion Criteria)

13. Earth’s Physical System
Human System
Atmosphere
Cryosphere
Lithosphere
Hydrosphere
Population
Culture
Economics
Social
Class
Politics
Buildings
Roads
Public
Infrastructure Housing
Constructed System

14. Identifying Problems
WUI
Fire Risk What knowledge
is pertinent?
What is included/excluded?
What is valued?
What is the focus?
What is expected? Where does the
problem
end/begin?
Who is involved?

15. “It is a misnomer to talk about
"natural" disasters as
if they could exist outside of
the actions and decisions of human
beings and their societies
For instance, floods, earthquakes,
and other so-called "natural" disaster
agents have social consequences only
because of the activities of
involved communities, before, during and
after the impact of a disaster.”
Framing Problems

16. Telling Stories with Uncertainty
“Of course, we need to reduce complexity; we need to
narrow down our focus and rely on specific expectations to
be capable of acting at all. However, the problem is not
sticking to certain expectations, reducing complexity, or
categorizing a multitude of phenomenon under one…
concept. The central problem for me is whether one is
prepared to give up one’s certainties when something
unexpected develops.”
– Humberto Maturana

17. Stories about Now
“If we do not know where we would be right
now if we could be wherever we wanted, how
can we possibly known where we will want to
be five or ten years from now?” – Russell Ackoff
Stories & Time

18. Stories about the future
“Transitions are radical shifts from one system
configuration to another. The term radical
refers to the scope of change, not its speed.
[They] are long term processes (40-50 years).”
– Grin, Rotmans, and Schot
Stories & Time

19. “A program is a sequence of predetermined
actions that must function in circumstances
that allow their completion. If the external
circumstances are unfavorable, the program
stops or fails….For sequences situated in a
stable environment, programs can be used.”
“A strategy, by contrast, is an action scenario
which can be modified in the light of new
information or chance events as they arise.
In other words, strategy is the art of working
with uncertainty.”
– Edgar Morin

20. Ackoff, R. L. (1999). Re-creating the corporation: A design of organizations for the 21st Century. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Axelrod, R., & Cohen, M. D. (2000). Harnessing complexity: Organizational implications of a scientific frontier. New York, NY: Basic Books.
Cilliers, P. (1998). Complexity & postmodernism: Understanding complex systems. London: Routledge.
Cilliers, P. (2002). Why we cannot know complex things completely. Emergence: Complexity and Organization, 4(1/2), 77-84.
Dorst, K. (2015). Frame innovation: Create new thinking by design. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.
Grin, J., Rotmans, J., Schot, J., Geels, F., & Loorbach, D. (2010). Transitions to sustainable development: New directions in the study of long-term
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Kurtz, C. F., & Snowden, D. J. (2003). The new dynamics of strategy: Sense-making in a complex and complicated. IBM Systems Journal, 42(3), 462-483.
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Caceres, & R. Harnden, Trans.)
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Morin , E. (2008). On complexity. (R. Postel, Trans.) Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press.
Quarantelli, E. L. (2005). A social science research agenda for the disasters of the 21st century: Theoretical, methodological and empirical issues and
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References